The invention relates to a soluble instant coffee and a process for its preparation.
Soluble coffee has been available on the market for over half a century. The production of such a soluble (instant) coffee has been known in the prior art. The green coffee was roasted and finely ground. Water was used to extract the soluble solid from roasted and ground coffee in a train of percolators. The extract was concentrated by evaporation or freeze concentration to a high concentration and was then spray dried or freeze-dried into powder form. During this operation, aroma flavor-components loss occurred in every step starting at the roasting process. This is due to the fact that the aroma is very volatile and is extremely unstable to heat, oxygen and light, which has been known in the prior art which provides disclosure of efforts and technologies employed in the soluble coffee industry to reduce aroma loss and to recover the aroma during soluble coffee manufacture to improve and to produce a better instant coffee quality. However, to date, there still is a great quality gap between coffee brew from roast and ground and instant coffee.
In the context of the present invention, a technique wherein green coffee first is extracted and a green powder obtained therefrom is heat treated is known from the disclosures of U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,758,927 and 1,932,769 already known in FR 52 337, FR 864 412, U.S. Pat. No. 2,872,323, FR 460 949, U.S. Pat. No. 2,758,927, U.S. Pat. No. 1,932,769 and GB 630 153.